Thursday, April 19, 2012

I've been following Governor Scott Walker on Twitter for a good while now and there are two clear trends. First, most stuff is unspeakably trivial (as discussed here). Second, when there is a tweet of any substance, it's often a sign that there's bad news on exactly the same topic that's just broken.

This has been his game on jobs. As Wisconsin has been to losing more jobs than any other state, every report is met by a 'look over there, not over here' tweet, like 'Our unemployment rate is lower than Illinois's rate'. In fact, now, when I see a tweet from the twit on economic news, I instantly check to see what bad news has come out about Wisconsin's continuing slide. Today, the tweet you see here came through and I went to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to see the headline pasted in below (screenshot from a later update, but text unchanged, I think).

15,600 jobs added in 2012 is not exactly impressive, but in fact, we've lost 23,900 jobs over the past year, so he had to pick a little uptick in the overall downward trend.

Are there Walker supporters who feel good about this approach to things?